In Crowded G.O.P. Field, a Lesser-Known Hopes to Capitalize on the Issues

Senator Sam Brownback, Republican of Kansas, at a campaign stop on Saturday in Sioux Center, Iowa. Mr. Brownback is focusing on early voting states in his bid for the nomination.Credit
Dave Weaver for The New York Times

ORANGE CITY, Iowa, March 10 — When the dapper man in the starched shirt, lavender tie and navy blue suit interrupted Donna Van Peursem, 61, and her friends at the Pizza Ranch here on Saturday, she failed to recognize him but sensed she somehow should.

Mrs. Van Peursem clucked out a greeting. But after Mr. Brownback, a Kansas Republican, moved to another table, she whispered to a reporter, “Who is he again?”

With his staunch fiscal and social conservative credentials, Mr. Brownback is trying to establish himself as the candidate with the most trustworthy ideological record, even as he bucks other Republicans on issues like immigration and the current troop buildup in Iraq.

“I think I offer a great contrast,” Mr. Brownback said Saturday at another campaign stop. “The positions I’ve articulated to you are positions I’ve felt for some period of time. I’ve articulated and I’ve pushed, and I think I can get a great grass-roots mobilization behind.”

But he is struggling to make himself known to most voters, and to convince them that his views on the issues are more important than the name recognition enjoyed by his better-known rivals in the crowded field seeking the Republican nomination.

He introduced himself to small clusters of voters on Saturday as part of a series of campaign appearances in northwestern Iowa. Many were encountering him for the first time and said they came away impressed. After clumping downstairs to listen to Mr. Brownback deliver his stump speech over pizza, Mrs. Van Peursem said he might get her vote.

“I really like him,” she said. “He’s very common.”

But many voters interviewed here, even those who responded well to his promise to become the “family president,” continued to wonder about his electability. Compared with the candidates considered the powerhouses of the Republican field — former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York, Senator John McCain of Arizona and former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts — Mr. Brownback is lagging in the polls and the fund-raising scramble in a party that has grown increasingly nervous about keeping its hold on the White House.

“I think in the end he has to prove he can beat someone like Senator Clinton,” said Carl E. Zylstra, president of a local Christian college, who came out to meet Mr. Brownback at another pizza place in neighboring Sioux Center.

Since establishing his presidential exploratory committee last December, Mr. Brownback, who was elected to the Senate in 1996, has been running a shoestring campaign with a heavy focus on three early voting states — Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina — hoping a favorable showing will help catapult him from the second tier of Republican candidates.

Mr. Brownback has been spending time in Iowa especially, where he hopes his agricultural background — he grew up on a farm in Kansas and served as the state’s agriculture secretary — coupled with his socially conservative stances and Midwestern sensibilities will play well.

He has also been honing his pitch as a “bleeding heart conservative.”

The phrase is his way of explaining his strong stances against abortion, same-sex marriage and government spending, which have made him popular among conservative activists, as well as some of his less ideologically orthodox stances.

Those include his advocacy on behalf of refugees in Sudan and North Korea, which led him to reach across the aisle to work with Senator Edward M. Kennedy; his legislation on sex trafficking, which paired him with Senator Paul Wellstone, a liberal Minnesota Democrat who died in 2002; and his focus on improving the prison system, which helps explain the night he spent in Angola State Prison in Louisiana soon after he announced his exploratory committee.

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“I am pro-life and whole life,” Mr. Brownback said Saturday, explaining that that meant fighting for the unborn but also for “the child in Darfur” and “people that are being trafficked out of North Korea.”

He traces his interest in humanitarian causes to a cancer scare in the mid-1990s, when he was a member of the House of Representatives. With the prognosis uncertain, he said he awoke in the middle of the night tormented about his life’s direction. Concluding that he was too consumed with worldly ambition, he said he crumpled his résumé into a ball and threw it away.

“To me, it was a very symbolic moment,” Mr. Brownback said in an interview. “That this is not what my life’s about.”

He pored over biographies of William Wilberforce, a 19th-century evangelical British parliamentarian who worked to end slavery in the British Empire and is a modern-day hero to many conservative Christians. Soon he was making the first of many trips to Africa.

Mr. Brownback, who tries to spend time daily in prayer and Bible study, converted to Roman Catholicism several years ago. On most Sundays, he attends both Mass and a service at an evangelical church in Topeka, Kan., where the rest of his family, which includes two children he adopted from China and Guatemala, worships.

He started out on Saturday delivering his message at a breakfast with more than a dozen local evangelical pastors and church members at a Holiday Inn in Sioux City. His talk of Darfur and North Korea, along with his litany of data points to support his contention that the traditional family needed to be preserved, won him murmurs of approval.

But he ran into resistance on immigration. Although he sought in appearances on Saturday to emphasize his support for securing the Mexican border and creating a system to ensure that Social Security numbers used by job applicants were valid, he voted in the Senate last year in favor of a guest worker program for illegal immigrants. It is a stance that has drawn ire from many conservatives.

“The illegals, I feel like we need to more than spank their hand,” said the Rev. Larry Gordon, senior pastor of Cornerstone World Outreach in Sioux City, pressing Mr. Brownback on the issue. “We need to more than say you shouldn’t be here. We need to kick them out. That’s my opinion, and I think that a major part of America feels that way.”

Another issue on which Mr. Brownback has broken ranks with many of his fellow Republicans is the strategy for the war in Iraq. He spoke out earlier this year against President Bush’s plan to send 21,500 more troops to Iraq, saying he thought a political solution was needed instead. The troop buildup did not come up on Saturday during his meetings with voters.

Just handfuls of people showed up at each of his appearances on Saturday. In contrast to higher-wattage competitors like Mr. McCain, who will come through Iowa next week with busloads of reporters and staff members, Mr. Brownback traveled with only two aides. Only a few local reporters showed up along the way.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A18 of the New York edition with the headline: In Crowded G.O.P. Field, a Lesser-Known Hopes to Capitalize on the Issues. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe